Lecture : Truth In Religious Experience
(Less realism)
Welcome to Saturday. I Hope you’ve found the Colloquium
worthwhile so far. I’ve certainly had some fascinating discussions
with people and the quality of questions makes me feel that any
one of you could be giving this speech in my place.
I want to start by just asking a few questions:
 If someone you met here at the colloquium told you that
they’d had a religious experience here at PAC what would you
think?
 What might they mean?
 Would you believe them?
 Assuming you were vaguely interested, how would you go
about trying to ascertain whether or not there was any truth
to the claim?
 Furthermore, what would be the response of our students to
such a claim?
It seems to me that many of us would react with incredulity to such
a claim, and yet, in my experience, most people, when asked if they
believe that there is a spiritual or religious essence to reality, tend
to agree that there is. So why do many of us both doubt claims to
religious experience whilst at the same time, believe that there is
more to life than atoms? Of course I am talking in generalisations
here, and I’m not basing this observation on statistical evidence,
but this has been my experience so far. In my talk I’m going to try
to examine this ambivalence, through the evaluation of claims to
religious experience.
It is essential at the start, at the risk of being tedious, to try to
define some key terms, and then I’ll come on to the evaluation of
religious experiences:
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In the context of my talk I’d like to define experience as “The
apprehension of an object, thought or emotion through the senses
or mind which involves active participation, whether physical or
mental, in an event”. I am trying to say that an experience is not
something which a person undergoes as much as something in
which the person partakes. There is an interaction between the
perceiver and the percept (ie that which is perceived) which
naturally involves interpretation and response on a multitude of
levels.
The key question is whether or not any significant claim to truth
can be justified when people claim to have any experience, let
alone a religious experience. The strange thing is, that unless there
are reasons to doubt people, we generally trust claims to
experience made by others, and this is significant. I shall return to
this later on, but suffice to say at this stage that we do, as a whole,
give great credence to our own experiences and to those which are
claimed by others.
So what is a religious experience? This is of course going to be a
lot harder to define, not least because a definition of religion is
problematic anyway, and in fact one of the main points I’m going
to make is that language as a whole can only take us so far in
describing and defining experiences.
I’ll define religious experience as “the apprehension of an object,
thought or emotion through the senses or mind which involves
active participation in an event, and where the perceiver believes
there to be a religious origin to the percept.” Inevitably this is an
awkward definition.
In essence I’m saying that a religious experience is a claim to a
religious experience. Whether or not a claim to such experience is
true is the matter in question, but I believe this is a good starting
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point since it tries to avoid the a priori assumption that either
religious experiences are possible, or that they are impossible. So
I’m going to start with the claim as the definition and then debate
the truth value of such claims.
The very ground on which we are discussing Religious experience
is based upon our realist or anti-realist persuasions. We have
already heard this distinction from other speakers, so I won’t bore
you with this again. Suffice to say that I’m approaching the issue of
religious experience from the position of a realist since, in my view
it is not possible to actually live as an antirealist, and if we are
going to be fully human, then we certainly need to live. What I
mean by this is that, as a matter of sanity, we cannot live our lives
as if all our ideas were merely only coherently true. We can
certainly philosophise that this is the case, but I don’t believe we
can live as if this were the case.
However, having claimed to be a realist I’d like to qualify that,
by saying that I believe there to be two key aspects of experience:
the internal, subjective part of experience and the external,
objective part of experience. These are inextricably and
mysteriously linked, but they are not one and the same, or else I
would be a solipsist, stuck in the quagmire of my own mind. And
that would be a real shame!
Thus I believe there to be both a reality to which the external
aspect of the experience refers, and also an internal aspect of the
experience. The former is that which may or may not correspond to
reality, the latter is something which coheres with our internalised
response to the external. Thus the realist and anti-realist positions
may be seen as more closely linked than we often take them to be.
So, to summarise here, for the purpose of evaluating claims to
religious experience I am taking these claims to be realist claims,
but with these further qualifications in place.
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I must also state at the start that by “religious” I am not exclusively
referring to Christianity, although much of what I say does refer to
Christianity.
So, what types of claims to religious experiences have been
made?
For a very good analysis of this issue I recommend you read
Caroline Franks Davis’ book “The evidential force of religious
experience” ISBN0198250010. In this book she distinguishes
various types of claims to religious experience, but she is careful to
point out that the boundaries between these types are neither fixed
nor clear-cut, and that many religious experiences are a
combination of the following. I shall begin by explaining these
types of religious experience and then I’ll spend some time
evaluating these different claims to religious experience.
But before I do this I want to urge you to start the next term, or the
next year with your students looking at four concepts: Proof,
Probability, Faith and Reason. This year we did this with every
year group from yr 8 to yr 12. I cannot overemphasise the
importance of this for your students: They simply must have some
grasp of the complexity of interdependence between these
concepts.
Now, if we are going to facilitate discussion on religious experience
with our students then they need to understand the variety of
forms of these claims that exist, so here are some types of religious
experiences:
a) Interpretive experiences:
Of course, all experience is interpreted, but here I am referring
to experiences which are interpreted from a particular religious
framework e.g interpreting an apparent chance meeting, which
subsequently transpires to be a life-changing meeting, as being
an angel sent from God to help you.
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b) Quasi-sensory experiences:
These are religious experiences “in which the primary element is
a physical sensation or whose alleged percept is of a type
normally apprehended by one of the five senses”. In this case
the percepts might be visions, dreams, voices, pain, heat, being
touched. Davis adds to this list the sorts of mental pictures and
images in our minds which conjure up sensory experiences such
as smells and sounds.
c) Revelatory experiences:
These are experiences when the perceiver has a sudden
conviction, inspiration, revelation, enlightenment, mystical
vision, or a flash of insight.
St Theresa of Avila writes: “The great inward light seemed to
illuminate my thoughts, I experienced a magnificent sensation
of arrival. I was filled with joy as though I had just discovered
the secret of world peace. I suddenly knew. The odd thing was
that I did not know what I knew. From then on I set out to
define it”. Notice that the way in which she knew was of a
different type to everyday, intellectual knowledge. It is as if it is
a self-authenticating experience which needs no external
verification because the nature of the experience itself is so
compelling. Much of our experiences are like this so why
assume that the religious experiences are different? The
assumption that perception of religious percepts are of a totally
different form needs qualifying rather than assuming.
d) Regenerative experiences:
These involve the revival of faith, body, mind and/or spirit. E.g
a feeling of being recharged with new hope, comfort, joy, peace,
security. Sometimes these feelings occur during prayer or
meditation, and can involve the perception of being saved by
Christ.
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It is well expressed by the following from The Bhagavad Gita:
“Even as the mighty winds rest in the vastness of the ethereal
space, all beings have their rest in me. Know thou this truth.”
When I think of these experiences I am reminded of Maslow’s
concept of self-actualisation or Jung’s concept of the resolution
of the self although I am not an expert enough to say that these
are clearly one and the same thing.
e) Numinous Experiences:
Drawing on Kant’s distinction between the noumenon (the
thing in itself)and the phenomenon (things as we perceive
them), Rudolf Otto best describes the Numinous experience in
the following way:
a) The experience that the material isn’t as powerful as
the spiritual
b) Mysterium tremendum:
i)
Feelings of awe, dread and terror
ii)
The perception of being overpowered by the numen
iii) A feeling of intense energy
iv) A sense of the wholly other nature of the ineffable
v)
A fascination of and attraction to the Numen
Also less extreme experiences can be numinous – for example
the experience of the sacredness of the world. Numinous
experiences are generally dualistic but can slip into mystical
oneness too, to which I’ll come later.
Think of the story of Moses and the burning bush where Moses
hides his face because he was afraid to look at God. Likewise, in
the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna describes the following on the
battlefield:
“ Trembling with awe and wonder, Arjuna bowed his head, and
joining his hands in adoration he thus spoke to his God:
‘I see the splendour of an infinite beauty which illumines the
whole universe. It is thee! With thy crown and sceptre and
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circle. How difficult thou art to see! But I see thee: as fire, as the
sun, blinding, incomprehensible.
Heaven and earth and all ye infinite spaces are filled with thy
spirit and before the wonder of thy fearful majesty these three
worlds tremble.’”
f) Mystical experiences:
These are the most difficult experiences to describe. It is here
that language most clearly fails to convey the experience. At the
heart of the mystical experience is a sense of paradox and a
sense that the duality of the world is merely a mental construct,
whilst the true reality lies in unity. Here are some aspects of
Mystical experience:
i) Apprehension of ultimate reality, the pinnacle of the spiritual
journey, the closest one can get to seeing reality face to face.
Normal experience is seen as a shadow, a cloud, a veil in
comparison with the mystical experience. Plato’s analogy of the
cave might be seen as expressing this aspect of the mystical
experience.
ii) A sense of freedom from the limitations of time and space,
and a dissolution of the boundary between the self and
everything else. Jacob Boehme writes “The soul here saith, I
have nothing, for I am utterly stripped and naked; I can do
nothing, for I have no manner of power, but am as water poured
out; I am nothing, for all that I am is no more than an Image of
Being, and only God is to me I AM; and so, sitting down in my
own Nothingness, I give glory to the Eternal Being, and will
nothing of myself, that so God may will all in me, being unto me
my God and All Things”.
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To the outsider of such experiences this sounds very negative,
since there is a focus on the loss of the self, to which humans
cling. However, to the mystic the self does not exist in the first
place. Rather it is the belief in the self which distances us from
the supreme reality.
The Zen Buddhist writer D.T Suziki describes it as follows:
“The individual shell in which my personality is so solidly
encased explodes at the moment of satori (enlightenment).
Not necessarily that I get unified with a being greater than
myself or absorbed in it, but that my individuality, which I
found rigidly held together and definitely kept separate from
other individual existences…melts away into something
indescribable, something which is of a quite different order
from what I am accustomed to.”
iii) A sense of oneness. This can be both a sense of oneness in
oneself (introvertive(after Stace)), or a sense of oneness
between oneself and everything outside of oneself
(extrovertive). The latter is described by William Blake’s words
“To see a world in a grain of sand, and Heaven in a wild flower”.
It is also expressed well by the tat tvam asi (that thou art) of the
Upanisads: ‘Whatever they are, whether tiger, lion, wolf, boar,
worm, fly, gnat or mosquito, they all become that (the ultimate
reality). That which is the subtlest of the subtle, the whole world
has it as its self. That is reality. That is the self, and that art
thou.” Here the self is understood not in the dualist way we
normally understand it but in the unified sense of being which
pervades all reality as a unified whole.
The oneness can be expressed in terms of a oneness with God or
a oneness with the universe.
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iv) A feeling of bliss or serenity. St Catherine of Genoa wrote
“Might but one little drop of what I feel fall into Hell, Hell would
be transformed into a Paradise”. Viktor Frankl wrote “For the
first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the
words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an
infinite glory.’”
Mystical states of mind sometimes sound indistinguishable
from psychosis. Guidance is often needed from a wise person to
help the mystic cope with the experience. This of course raises
the question as to how to distinguish mystical experiences from
psychosis, and I shall return to this point later on.
g) I’d like to add to Davis’ list, experiences of the religious. By
this I mean the experience of witnessing, whether or not as an
outsider, the rituals, buildings, scriptures and people of
different religions. In these cases it would be possible to claim,
in a very ordinary sense, that one had had a religious experience
if one means in this case an experience of a religion rather than
of the supreme being or reality behind the religion. This
different approach to religious experience is least likely to be
refuted by the sceptic, and this is a significant point. If people
generally believe others when they say, for example, ‘I had an
experience of Islam when I visited the Dome of the Rock’ then
why does the sceptic generally disbelieve a person when they
say ‘I had an experience of Allah’? This point is taken up by
Richard Swinburne to whom I’ll refer to this point later on.
DVD of scene from American Beauty, and “unspeakable truths
poem”. Discuss with your neighbour whether or not these are
examples of religious experience.
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Evaluating realist claims of religious experience:
In what follows I am going to evaluate realist claims to religious
experience, with reference to four key areas:
1.The first of these key areas is that of Conflicting truth
claims
Along with David Hume, many others have suggested that there
is a problem with the conflicting truth claims of different
religions. The argument states that if a Hindu perceives Krishna
and a Christian perceives the Virgin Mary, these can’t both be
true. If one is true then the other must be false since they belong
to distinct, mutually exclusive traditions. Furthermore, to
equate all religious experience as of coming from the same
source is both a misrepresentation of beliefs from within
religious traditions and also a pluralist imposition from the
outside, laden with its own values and beliefs, which can’t be
justified.
Counter-arguments to the conflicting truth claims criticism:
a) Interpretive religious experiences are, by their description,
understood as being interpretations from a certain
perspective, so biases are already being acknowledged.
Apparently conflicting experiences can be explained with
reference to the cultural and religious context in which the
experience takes place. Thus a person living in India in
1000BCE is likely to express a religious experience
differently to someone living in Mecca today.
On the other hand this explanation doesn’t help us with
distinguishing real religious experiences from false ones, and
therefore interpretive religious experiences are not sufficient
evidence in themselves for a reality behind the perceptions.
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b) Different religious experiences and revelations show an
evolving progress towards a greater truth. The understanding
that scientific knowledge has evolved over the years can be
matched with the understanding that religious knowledge
has evolved over the years. With this approach we can argue
that we are getting closer to the religious Ultimate Reality
just as we are getting closer to scientific truth.
The problem with this counter-argument is that it renders all
past religious experiences and indeed religions as a whole,
only partially true. This is not something that can be
accepted by the exclusive Abrahamic faiths for whom their
own beliefs are understood to be the final and unalterable
truth. Furthermore, conversion experiences imply an
exclusivist approach to religious truth-claims, since they rely
on the assumption that the ways of looking at the world
previous to the religious conversion experience, were
erroneous.
On the other hand, as a general rule Buddhism and
Hinduism are faiths which sit comfortably with a pluralist
and evolving journey towards truth. Ultimately where we
stand on this issue will largely be conditioned by the religious
context in which we are living, including the pluralist and
exclusivist positions, and this therefore leads us back to the
conclusion that these experiences are not sufficient evidence
in themselves for a reality behind the perceptions.
c) In terms of Mysticism there are great overlaps between the
faiths. All of the faiths have their own tradition of mysticism
and often they see it as the apex of the religious journey
towards ultimate reality. The aspects of Mystical experience
outlined above are found in all religions, including the
concept that ultimately, mystical experiences are ineffable
and full of paradox. Davis suggests that mystical experiences
defy western, Cartesian logic, and that perhaps there is a
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higher type of ‘mystical logic’ which is not based on a
dualistic understanding of the world but on a monistic
understanding of the world. From our western Cartesian
backgrounds we tend to assume that logic holds the keys to
truth, and this needs some justification.
We can use logic adequately to assess arguments, but we
can’t use logic to determine whether or not logic is the final
arbiter of truth. Rather than being further from truth
perhaps we are nearer to truth when we point to the limits of
language in explaining what we have experienced. This is,
after all, what drives so much of our artistic endeavours.
The Via negativa is, I believe, a good example of this. The
approach of the via negativa is to say what ultimate reality is
not (rather than to say what ultimate reality is) so as to avoid
making positive claims which, by the limited nature of
language, are always insufficient to describe ultimate reality.
Thus for Buddhists, Nirvana is said to be the quenching of
thirst, the end of greed, hatred and delusion and the
annihilation of the self (not to be confused with suicide).
Likewise the early thinker known as Pseudo-Dionysius writes
: “(The ultimate reality) is not soul, or mind…nor can It be
described by the reason or perceived by the understanding,
since It is not number, or order, or greatness, or littleness…It
is not immoveable nor in motion, or at rest….”
You could try this with your students: Get them to describe
what God is not (assuming for the time that there is a God).
Whilst there are differences in some areas of mysticism,
there is also a core of agreement across the board. Take the
example of the Trimurti in Hinduism arising from the single
ultimate reality of universal spirit called Brahman; The
Godhead which lies behind the Christian trinity; and the
Three bodies or Rupas of Buddha coming out of a unified
Truth-Body (ie truth itself) in Mahayana Buddhism. These
may not be the same thing, but the similarities face us with,
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at the very least, a strange coincidence. We are reminded of
the story of the Blind men and the elephant.
Others would want to point to the discrepancies between the
mysticisms of the world’s religions, arguing that this
common core is a fabrication, based on the preconceived
pluralist agenda. And they could be right. But for some the
agreements outweigh the disagreements.
This is magnified many times when we take into account our
biological nature as animals. We are born with what
Schopenhauer called the ‘will to life’, and the basic instincts
of distinguishing friends from foe. We are born with the
dualistic cognitive frameworks which help us to distinguish
ourselves from everything around us, to enable us to survive.
Furthermore, we are bred into clans and tribes, we are
essentially adolescent in our need for peer recognition and
the security of a group, and thus we erect barriers between
ourselves and other humans. They who are not-me, soon
become not-us. And we are glad to know that they are other,
and we are even more glad to know that we are right and they
are wrong. But stop for a moment and read the scriptures of
the great traditions and we find, amongst the rules and
rituals, a call for togetherness for people, a commitment to
love and fair play. The golden rule. Dig even deeper to the
mystical roots of religions and I sense, in so far as I
understand, that the divisions fall right away, completely.
And this is, in my view, the deepest mystery. And this is as
much as can be said, the rest we can only point to, or
experience for ourselves.
I may of course be entirely mistaken. I may be
misrepresenting the religions which do hold exclusive
positions. It is difficult if not impossible to find the true
religion underneath the traditions and cultures of the world.
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Indeed if we were to find this truth it would reduce the
mystery which is at the heart of religion and which is both
wonderful and frustrating! However, perhaps it is a peculiar
modern day misconception that mystery implies falsity.
I think that many of our students have forgotten their ability to
wonder at the world. They, and we, are numbed by
entertainment and other drugs and we often ignore the journey
towards truth altogether, because being entertained
is……….more entertaining. I want my students to be more open
to mystery, and I’ve found that this is best done through
balancing philosophical debate with stillness and meditation.
And I don’t get the right balance often myself! We need to
balance these in our own lives to be fully human, by teaching
through being full….. of being. We can open our students to the
spiritual by being spiritual ourselves, by embodying the virtues,
the questing and the spirit we’d like to see in them. And here I
mean spiritual rather than being filled with words, humour or
entertainment (although these have their place too!). This is our
most difficult task, and I almost constantly fall short of the mark
myself, but it is the most noble task we can have.
Coming back to Mysticism, we can either focus on the
disagreements between religious mysticisms or on the
similarities. It is difficult to be sure which of these is the
greater. My hunch is that the similarities are greater than the
differences. Furthermore, I’d argue that to see the world
through spiritual eyes is to seek harmony between people, to
seek an end to hatred, to encourage love for others and for
oneself, and to dismantle the barriers which separate us and
which are the cause of so much pain.
But maybe I’m wrong. The main thing, I believe, is to
continue trying to understand, in the knowledge that we can’t
be sure, and to embrace the uncomfortable mystery, whilst
trying to wrestle with it at the same time! It seems to me a
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strange, if not contradictory, thing to claim that we as finite
beings can be certain in our understanding of our version of
God and truth. I’d rather a path of uncertainty, whilst
acknowledging that this path itself could be construed as a
form of certainty. That’s why we need to keep searching, and
that is why we need to keep our students searching.
2. The second area I want to look at is that of
Reductionism
If we believe that the universe is nothing but atoms, then all
religious experience is to be explained through the physical laws
of the universe. We might get there through psychological
explanations such as hyper-suggestibility, sense deprivation,
mental illness and maladjustment, but the reductionist won’t
stop at these explanations, she/he will want to go right down to
the laws of physics.
That does of course leave consciousness itself: if the universe is
essentially matter how does matter become aware of itself? This
question is still unfathomable and it is perhaps the last holy
grail of the materialist search. Certainly, there are endless
articles on the issue of consciousness amongst the scientific
community.
What I find interesting is that at the limits of our understanding
both in science and in religion we use metaphors and analogies
to make sense of what we find difficult to put into words. What
exactly is anti-matter? How can a photon be a particle and a
wave at the same time? Why do we think of atoms as little balls
anyway? The answer lies in the fact that science needs
analogies to put mathematics into concepts about which we can
talk.
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Although science helps us to explain a great deal, there are also
deeply mysterious aspects of the physical world, and hence the
use of models. It seems a strange case of double standards to
allow these scientific models whilst at the same time refuting
religious models. Furthermore, the reductionist materialist
might believe that all is physical, but he/she doesn’t behave as if
this is true a lot of the time. If reductionism were true then all
the meaning in our lives would evaporate, and this is a theory
most sane people cannot live by.
If reductionism is a belief which is impossible to live then to
what extent is it valid? Humans are, in my view, spiritual beings
as much as they are biological organisms. Why is this so often
assumed to be a dichotomy? Cannot there be many levels to
reality? Are we not both animals and also conscious artists? Do
we not fall in love and write poems as well as reproduce and kill
animals for our survival? Is it not possible that free will,
consciousness and even a spiritual level of reality exist, perhaps
emerge from the physical universe, or perhaps coexist alongside
it?
At any rate, most people, despite (and some times because of)
the advances of an increasingly materialist and secular outlook
in some parts of the world, do still believe in a spiritual quality
to the universe. People in some parts of the world have stopped
going to church, but the spiritual yearning is still there. Again,
what I’m saying is that there need be no dichotomy between
spiritual and material ways of seeing the world.
The problem is that if reductionism is true and all things are
essentially reduced to matter then the idea of reductionism itself
is nothing but matter. If this is the case it is difficult to see the
relevance of it, since it is matter and nothing more, in fact it is
no longer an idea at all.
For these reasons we might argue that those who reduce
religious experience and all experience through psychology to
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physics raise just as many questions as they seem to answer.
And we should not hesitate to discuss this with our students,
and we should greatly encourage discussion with our maths and
science departments on this issue. We can know a great deal
through science and maths, but we can also know through
emotion and the spirit.
3. The third key area is that of Critical realism
Critical realists such as Keith Yandell hold that we can use
certain criteria to assess truth claims about all experience
including religious experience. We might make a list of criteria
which we could use to ascertain the validity of a religious
experience, and we should visit these with our students to give
them some tools for discernment:
a) Internal and external consistency:
E.g the coherence of the concepts used in the
description by the perceiver; the way the experience fits
into the pattern of other experiences; consistency with
non-religious background knowledge
b) The fruits of the experience:
e.g good for the perceiver in terms of leading to a life of
wisdom, humility, and goodness towards others;
tending to building up the community rather than
destroy it
c) Consistency with other religious doctrines within the
same religious tradition
d) Being of stable mind: most religious communities
distinguish between healthy and neurotic religious
experiences. Most claims to religious experience by
those with psychotic tendencies cannot be used as
evidence for the reality behind the experiences. Whilst
many psychotics do claim to have religious experiences
they also claim to have non-religious experiences which
are also psychotic e.g persecution by imagined others.
They also have a tendency towards fragmented thought
as a whole. Also, psychotics often claim to have
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religious experiences which are painful or involve
persecution and self harm and this counts against the
‘fruits’ idea above. Psychotics are often terrified of a
fragmentation of the self rather than experiencing the
uplifting unitary peacefulness of the mystic.
In my view, religious experience is neither necessarily a neurosis
nor an opiate.
Each of these criteria of critical realists might be criticised, in
particular some will point out the radically different nature of
religious experience to normal sense experience. Furthermore,
religious experience often happens after a period of training and
this counts against its authenticity. However, flashes of
inspiration often occur in scientists after concentrated periods
of time at work on a problem. To simply say that it is justified to
accept scientific flashes of insight but not to accept religious
flashes of insight is to beg the question.
In fact all our interpretations of experience are based on layers
of mental training. Language, acquisition of knowledge,
perception and beliefs are interrelated and all play their part in
the way we see the world, but it is a leap from this to saying that
they determine what we see. Rather they help to shape it.
Alvin Plantinga put forward the idea that religious experiences
are, for the believer, ‘properly basic beliefs’ meaning that they
are self-evident and do not need any more evidence than other
perceptual beliefs which we take to be true in our everyday
experiences. But Plantinga acknowledges himself that this is
likely to only show that for believers it is reasonable to accept
one’s religious experiences, and not that this will be enough
evidence to convince the sceptic.
4. My fourth key area is that of the problem of the
Ineffable
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If Ultimate reality is so ineffable (not possible to describe in
words), we surely can’t talk about it at all, and if this is the case
then we can’t argue for its existence any more than we can argue
against it. This is where faith comes in. Faith is (as John Hick
put it) the ‘seeing-as’ and ‘experiencing-as’. It is the way in
which we view the world despite our limits of understanding. In
Buddhism the analogy is used of a finger pointing to the moon,
where we shouldn’t focus on the finger (dogma, doctrine) but on
the moon itself. Perhaps getting too hung up on words is like
looking at the finger and not the moon.
On the other hand some would say that describing religious
experience as indescribable is a cop out! I wonder what you
think.
Religious experience is not the only experience which we find
difficult to put into words. What of love and beauty, what of the
smell of coffee? These too are ineffable. Aquinas’ analogies of
proportion and attribution are useful here: we can talk of love
because we can experience love in our lives from other humans,
but this is a shadow when compared with the love of God for us.
Hence God’s love is ineffable but we can still experience it.
For Buber, a main characteristic of religious experience was of
relationship. For Buber experience of God is an I-thou, personal
relationship analogous to our relationships with other humans,
but different in quality. This is distinct from an I-it relationship
which we might have with an object. As such it is necessarily
ineffable since all relationships we have with each other are
ultimately impossible to describe fully. It’s a matter of degree,
and hence proportion, as Aquinas pointed out.
In our restless and overloaded lives it is difficult to have time to
stop and rest. It is difficult to find time for quietness and
stillness, but I believe that it is at these times that the greatest
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spiritual insights often arise. Sitting still surrounded by natural
beauty, meditation through prayer, studying the scriptures,
chanting, breathing and visualisations are all very useful tools
for bringing an antidote to all these words.
I am well aware of the irony of my saying this to you today, and
so I propose, as a brief break from my words, for us to sit
silently for a minute. (Thumbs exercise).
This is an exercise which I find most useful with my students as
a way into silence and stillness.
 Writer’s week vs St.Peter’s Cathedral
Now, I’m afraid I need to carry on with my talk….
5. The fifth area I want to touch on briefly is the
Problem of Classical Theism
The Classical Theist concept of God faces many problems, to
which believers consider that there are answers. These include
the problem of evil, the problem of a bodiless God acting in a
world limited by time and space, the paradoxes of God being
transcendent and immanent, timeless and everlasting, personal
and impersonal and so forth.
I don’t want to even begin to analyse these today, but they do of
course provide further debate. If we were able to show logically
that God is an ontological a priori impossibility then we might,
if we are sticking to logic, have disproved God’s existence. This
has not been done adequately, as far as I am aware, nor do I
believe that it will be done and as such there is, in my mind, at
least the possibility that God exists. If this is so then there is, at
least a possibility that religious experiences are sometimes
really true. Nonetheless the tensions inherent in the God of
classical theism are too great for some, like Don Cuppitt, who
have let go of this view altogether. I imagine that these tensions
are the ones you might be exploring with your students in
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philosophy of religion classes. The students will certainly have a
view on these issues. I simply leave you a question: What sence
can we make of the concept of God?
6. Finally I want to look at Cumulative arguments
Both the arguments for and against religious experience are
strongest when put together cumulatively. The final conclusion is a
matter of evidence leading to faith, and Richard Swinburne makes
a valuable contribution to this debate. He argues from the
principles of credulity and testimony. The principle of credulity
states that in the absence of the following we should believe our
own perceptions, including religious experiences:
a) The conditions of the experience leading generally to
unreliable claims
b) The subject being generally unreliable
c) The percept not being present
d) The alleged percept being present, but not a cause of the
subject’s experience.
The Principle of credulity only shows that Religious Experience
is, in some instances, probable, not certain. In many if not most
cases Swinburne is happy to concede that religious experience is
unfounded, but he thinks that in some cases it is founded by the
absence of evidence to the contrary.
Swinburne’s second principle, the principle of testimony, comes
out of the principle of credulity: we can’t test everything, so in
general we should believe the testimony of others in the absence
of evidence which might count towards disbelief. This is
generally the case: when people tell us they’ve experienced
something we generally believe them.
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Thus if we put the principle of testimony and credulity together
there will be some cases in which it is justifiable to believe that a
real religious experience has taken place. And here I don’t just
mean a claim to religious experience, but that a reality lies
behind the experience, to which the experience refers.
Assuming his principles of credulity and testimony, Swinburne
goes on to argue for God’s existence. He argues that if the
evidence for God’s existence was very low then this might count
against God, but this is not the case (since there is at least some
evidence for God e.g design, cosmos, ontology) and therefore
belief in God is more probable than belief in his non-existence.
So he combines the principles of credulity and testimony to
arrive at the conclusion that sometimes when a claim is made to
religious experience this is more likely to be true than to be
false.
The principle of credulity implies that the sceptic has a more
difficult task than the theist.
Criticisms of Swinburne:
i)
ii)
iii)
Swinburne is Christocentric, and doesn’t take account of
the diversity of Religious experiences
Conflicting truth claims between religions exist eg
Buddhism and Christianity. If he is right it counts against
truth claims of other religions.
Most experiences work with Swinburne’s criteria but to
place experience of God beside other experiences and to
apply the same criteria for judging perception and
testimony is to make a categorical mistake. On the other
hand this criticism itself begs the question: why assume
the categories are so dissimilar? Furthermore, this
criticism seems to have beneath it the assumption that
really the only reality is the material, and this is as we
have seen questionable, and impossible to justify without
reference to faith in the materialist world view. In other
words it is a circular argument.
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iv)
Finally, he argues that our starting point should be
credulity not scepticism, and this is dubious, as Descartes
would want to argue if he were here.
Davis points out that what one considers sufficient evidence will
depend on the circumstance. ‘seeing a rabbit in the field’ is
different to ‘seeing the Risen Christ’. She goes on to write that
challenges to a perceptual experience may be overcome in two
ways: If the challenge is defeated, or if the challenge is
outweighed by other evidence in favour of the validity of the
experience.
In other words if there is cumulative evidence which weighs
heavier for the reality of the perceived religious experience, then
it is reasonable to believe in the reality of the experience. If on
the other hand the cumulative evidence against the experience
is greater than that for the experience then it is more reasonable
to disbelieve. Of course the problem lies in determining which
side of the argument has the stronger case.
Anthony Flew described the leaky bucket argument, in which he
criticised the cumulative case for God by saying that many
arguments each with flaws do not lead to a good argument
overall, in the same way that a series of leaky buckets put inside
each other still leaks. However, if Flew is right about the short
comings of the cumulative argument in favour of religious
experience, there must also be shortcomings in any cumulative
case against religious experience too.
So what is my conclusion?
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I hope that I’ve at
least stimulated some debate today. My overall conclusion is
that when we claim to have a religious experience there are
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some indicators to which we can refer to test this claim, albeit
imperfectly. Thus a claim to religious experience is not just a
fantasy, but a claim to a true reality beyond that experience. The
experience itself is a signifier and a pointer towards something
else, something mysterious. This experience is impossible to
communicate perfectly, and so too are other experiences we’ve
had, but this mystery is a cause for creativity, and the claim to
truth is no less valid. And this means that religious experience is
not off limits in the classroom, since acknowledging mystery is
at the heart of the religious journey.
It is this epistemic distance, this cloud of unknowing which I
feel allows for faith and for the spiritual journey towards
understanding. We will all have experiences on the way which
are part of this journey, I for my part find music, meditation and
the natural world to be the best catalysts for religious
experience, you no doubt have your own preferred ways or
perhaps you think there is no spiritual reality. Either way I wish
you well on your onward journey.
Any questions?
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